Star rating: **** A special critic's award for best tune title at Edinburgh Jazz Festival 2009 goes to Kevin Mackenzie for Finlay Finally Finds His Feet.

Star rating: ****

A special critic's award for best tune title at Edinburgh Jazz Festival 2009 goes to Kevin Mackenzie for Finlay Finally Finds His Feet.

Here were four musicians playing, figuratively, as if they had their elbows on a bar and were chewing the fat, and as the minutes ticked by one would nudge the other into revealing more or moving on to another story. It wasn't a private conversation, either, as Mackenzie's opening gambit conveyed to all and sundry the inspiration behind it.

His co-leader, New York-based alto saxophonist Lauren Stillman's P and Mackenzie's own You'll Never Know may have given away a bit less with their titles but both pieces fostered the mood of geniality. Stillman, as he would confirm again in the more formal setting of David Milligan's Sylvander & Clarinda, is a player who can do joined-up thinking, marshalling ideas with a purpose so that his improvisations always reach a satisfying pay-off. The altoist's tone complements Mackenzie's style and in bassist Aidan O'Donnell and drummer Alyn Cosker they had an ideal rhythm team.